The New Zealand Herald has an altogether more benign view of the impact of the leaks and of America’s role in the world.

Paul Thomas’s take:

These supposedly shocking revelations fall into two categories: those that told us what we already knew, and those that confirmed what we strongly suspected…..

While this affair is obviously embarrassing for the US, it’s surely not as damaging as the alarmists would have us believe. US diplomats may get less bang for their buck when wining and dining their sources from now on but overall America doesn’t come off too badly.

For years the US has hinted that what Arab leaders say in private is different from their public pronouncements. There could hardly be a better illustration of this double-speak than the Saudi king privately urging the US to bomb Iran.

And nothing that has emerged so far portrays the US as the bogeyman of leftist demonology – the remorseless, amoral military-industrial complex that stops at nothing to advance its interests.

On the contrary, rather than even being the global policeman, the picture of America which emerges is that of a well-meaning but insufficiently feared teacher struggling to keep his unruly classroom from descending into anarchy.

The real story probably lies between these two extremes with the US not a ravening global menace, but not an ineffectual school marm either.